Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

Billions of years ago, when the earth was still cooling, Donna Summer was queen and I was on the road with the carnival, there was absolutely fuck all to do, after the show shut for the night, in Hoxie, Kansas, Liberal (a complete misnomer, mind you), Kansas, Lovington, New Mexico or the myriad other tiny hamlets we played.

In these towns we were the big night out fun entertainment. Yup, we were it. Poor sods. OK, there was more...barely. Usually it was a dusty, decaying bar with a pool table and too many rednecks. That is, these joints existed as long as we weren’t playing a dry county.

Dry Kansas counties are red, wet are blue and mixed are yellow

"A dry county is a county in the United States whose government forbids the sale of alcoholic beverages. Some prohibit off-premises sale, some prohibit on-premises sale, and some prohibit both. Hundreds of dry counties exist across the United States, a majority of them in the South."

Barbaric. I know.

Now, at 19, my idea of a fun time was, unsurprisingly, planets and light years away from what farmers, cowboys and feed and grain clerks found interesting or exciting. PLUS, a back country farm town of 9,000 souls isn’t going to attract or support a weekend folk singer. Not even a monster truck rally, a 'psychic' or, god forbid, a dance club.

I wasn’t expecting Studio 54, O’Banions or The Rat. Astoundingly, I was smart enough to fathom that nothing like that would be on the menu. I hadn't anticipated the full on monastic environment though.

Even in the small, rural, western Pennsylvania town where I went to college there was always, on nearly any given evening, a boy or girl in a corner of the bar plunking the guitar while singing Rickie Lee Jones, Loggins and Messina or Neil Young covers. A university town, even a tiny one, will always have more nightlife, ANY nightlife. I grok that. Truly I do.

This is the where I grew up -- a dozen different college towns across the Northeast and Midwest. It's what I knew. It's what, silly me, I expected. To me, this was civilization.

Hello and welcome to the big wide world of Culture Shock.

Understandably, not being into Cow Tipping or Goat Roping, I got my punk/folk/rock/classical music loving ass off the road while the getting was good.
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere -- Neil Young